Human nails and toenails grow continuously and need to regularly be trimmed. Since roughly trimmed nails or toenails have sharp edges which may lead to snagging of the nail, causing tearing damage to the nail or the material on which it is snagged, it is customary to file the trimmed nail until it is smooth. The typical nail filing tools are a nail grinding pad such as a plastic board with an applied sandpaper or abrasive or an emery board; or a metal nail file.
It has been known to apply designs, such as logos of beauty shops or of companies on the sandpaper face, and/or artwork to such nail grinding pads. The typical printing method for printing on the sandpaper face of a nail grinding pad is to laminate preprinted plastic film or sheet onto the sandpaper face of the nail grinding pad using a thermo compression bonding method. However, the oil based ink used to print designs and artwork on the plastic film or sheet often coats the sandpaper surface, decreasing the grinding efficiency of the sandpaper surface. Nail care products having a grinding face with a film of oil based ink will not grind or polish nails well and smoothly.
More recently, water based inks have been used to print designs on the laminating sheets applied to the sandpaper face of nail care products. However, a problem with this approach is that in many nail care products the sandpaper face is embossed very finely, and the water based inks tend to run along the embossing. In addition, since the printed designs are made up with various colors, different water based ink colors will tend to bleed into neighboring colors.